You know that phrase, “Brevity is the soul of wit”? Well, the people who make movie comedies these days don’t seem to know it.

The rule of thumb used to be that comedies should be no more than 100 minutes long and, while that’s arbitrary and dumb, it does impose some discipline on comedies, which tend to be funnier when they don’t overstay their welcomes. The kings of welcome-stretching are Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. Both writer/directors craft hilarious and thoughtful scenes but often encourage actors to improvise scenes that dilute the impact of the comedy and, too often, don’t make sense for the characters. Take Feig’s two-hour-plus “Spy,” which is very funny but has dead spots that made me wonder if it would be even funnier if there were 15 minutes less of it.

Melissa McCarthy, who has been in danger of playing the same bull-in-the-china-shop character too many times, freshens things up in “Spy” as Susan Cooper, a CIA desk jockey who is thrust into the field when her favorite agent, Jude Law in a slight variation on James Bond, goes down. The role plays to Mc- Carthy’s improv background because she gets to be all meek and mild as Susan, but Susan has been so thoroughly trained and is so good at getting into her undercover characters that it’s as if she becomes a different person. Susan, for instance, uses phrases like “gee whillickers” but her alter egos go straight for the sorts of words that guarantee a movie an R rating.

The thriller elements of “Spy” aren’t especially complicated: There’s a nuclear bomb that a bunch of people — including sleazy Bobby Cannavale as well as Rose Byrne, who appears to be wearing a pillbox hat made out of her own hair — are trying to get their hands on. Susan needs to stop that while avenging her friend’s death and trying to keep a lid on a super-intense agent who has gone rogue.

As that intense rogue agent, Jason Statham is the movie’s biggest surprise. Sending up the sort of musclehead he has played in, basically, every movie he’s ever made, Statham has a great deadpan. He makes sure his character appears ridiculous at all times but isn’t aware of his ridiculousness at any time. It’s a gem of a performance, as is Byrne’s as a mean girl all grown up.

“Spy” would benefit from more of them and, for crying out loud, if you have the great Allison Janney in a movie, please give her more to do. But “Spy” could use less gruesome violence, since I suspect the people who want to view a long knife being removed from the hand it has nearly bisected are going to “Insidious: Chapter 3” this weekend, and it could use less random riffing. For instance, I lost track of the number of times McCarthy began a sentence with, “You look like” and then ended it with a mismatched adjective/noun combo. One or two of those are funny (my favorite is directed at Byrne: “You look like a slutty dolphin trainer”) but, in keeping with the overall sense that some trimming of “Spy” is in order, there are way too many of them.

Chris Hewitt was the Pioneer Press movie critic and then an arts and entertainment reporter from 1993 to 2017.

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